After being separated from my family, I became a darling of the military region thanks to my medical

The corridor on the second floor of the administration building was so quiet that only the whistling sound of the wind passing through the broken window could be heard.

Hu Dazhi paced back and forth in the hallway twice, his feet practically burning from the effort. He glanced back at the two nurses behind him carrying basins and thermos flasks, and whispered, "When you go in, watch what you say. She's from a big city and is going through a tough time. If she starts crying inside, you'd better be careful not to let Director Zhao hear, or I'll be in trouble too."

The two nurses, the round-faced one called Xiao Liu and the tall one called Xiao Zhang, were both in their early twenties. Upon hearing this, they nodded vigorously.

"Dean Hu, don't worry." Xiao Liu stuffed the rag into his pocket and muttered, "Our archives room hasn't been opened for three years. It smells like rat droppings. Is that a place for a human to stay? I would cry if I were in your shoes."

Hu Dazhi sighed.

He genuinely felt that Old Zhao had gone too far. Even though Ye Zhen had gotten in through connections, the several boxes of German goods she brought showed she came with sincerity. Throwing such a "god of wealth" into the dustbin—what if she got angry and ran away? Who would use that ECG monitor then? Just to display it?

"Alright, go in."

Hu Dazhi took a deep breath, mentally preparing himself to face a tearful, grumbling young lady, and pushed open the peeling wooden door to the archives room.

"Squeak!"

The old door hinges emitted a grinding sound that made your teeth ache.

The expected sobbing did not occur.

They were greeted by a rhythmic, rustling sound and dust that had not yet settled in the air.

Sunlight slanted into the room, casting golden beams of light through the swirling dust.

The "high-ranking official's daughter-in-law" who was the talk of the entire hospital was now wearing a blue floral square scarf wrapped around her head, which she had found somewhere. She had long since taken off her expensive wool coat and replaced it with a yellowish old white lab coat. Judging from the ill-fitting cuffs, she probably just grabbed it from the hook behind the door.

She was standing on a rickety wooden chair, sleeves rolled up, holding a makeshift feather duster made of newspaper, cleaning the dust from the top filing cabinet.

With swift movements and an extremely tricky angle of wrist strike, the dust obediently falls into the dustpan held in the other hand instead of flying everywhere.

Hearing the door open, Ye Zhen paused and turned around, looking down at him.

Those eyes looked over through the swirling dust, showing no resentment, no anger, as calm as someone checking the number of instruments on an operating table.

"Dean Hu, is something the matter?" she asked.

The voice came through the mask, muffled, yet exuding a calmness that deterred anyone from acting rashly.

Hu Dazhi stood frozen at the door, mouth agape, like a fatheaded fish starving for air.

"Uh... Comrade Ye, I think this is too dirty. I'm afraid you can't handle it all by yourself. Bring two people to help out." Hu Dazhi awkwardly rubbed his hands and pointed to the two nurses behind him who were dumbfounded.

Ye Zhen's gaze swept over the two basins of hot water and the rags, and her eyes softened.

She jumped off the chair so lightly that she made no sound.

"Thank you, Dean Hu." Ye Zhen took off her dusty cotton gloves and didn't refuse the politeness. "Perfect timing. Since you're here, please help sort these piles. I've already cleared out the shelves here. By year, the left side is for internal medicine, the right side is for surgery, and the infectious disease and obstetrics and gynecology items are in that metal cabinet separately."

The tone was so natural, it was as if the head of surgery was assigning beds to interns.

Xiao Liu and Xiao Zhang exchanged glances, momentarily stunned by the aura emanating from the other, and instinctively straightened their backs, replying, "Okay!"

With manpower available, the archives room, which had previously resembled a mass grave, quickly took shape.

Ye Zhen worked tirelessly, but she never acted recklessly. She directed the two nurses on how to spray water to suppress dust and how to use the stability of triangles to stack the loose medical record bags, with astonishing efficiency.

In less than an hour, the original red paint color of the tabletop, which had been covered in dust, was revealed, and the pile of papers on the ground was neatly put back in place.

"Take a break, take a break." Hu Dazhi plopped down at the only desk, panting heavily. He pulled out a pack of Daqianmen cigarettes from his pocket, but then remembered that this was an archive room full of flammable paper, so he could only put it down awkwardly.

Xiao Liu poured a cup of hot water for everyone, held the enamel mug, and boldly looked at Ye Zhen.

Ye Zhen removed her headscarf and mask, revealing a clean yet strikingly fair face. A speck of ash clung to the tip of her nose, but instead of making her look disheveled, it added a touch of lively, down-to-earth charm.

"Dr. Ye," Xiao Liu changed her address, no longer calling him "comrade," "I heard that the city is full of cars and has central heating in winter, is that true? Are doctors there spared from having to use stoves like we do?"

Hu Dazhi also perked up his ears.

Ye Zhen blew away the foam in the cup, took a sip of hot water, and felt a little warmer.

"There are cars, but those are for leaders. Most people still ride bicycles, the old-fashioned ones." Ye Zhen smiled faintly, the coldness in her eyes and brows softening a bit. "The winter winds in the north of the city are fierce. When riding against the wind, you have to pedal one full circle and then back half a circle. As for heating, the big hospitals have it, but if you're making house calls in the alleys, you still have to crawl into a coal shed, and your hands will be frozen like carrots."

"Huh? So even in the city it gets cold?" Xiao Zhang's eyes widened, somewhat disillusioned.

"It's the same everywhere. As long as you're in this line of work, there's no such thing as a comfortable life." Ye Zhen put down her cup and said calmly, "The operating room is hot under the shadowless lamps, but sometimes you have to stand for hours and you don't even dare to pee. Your legs are so swollen that they feel like they're filled with lead. At that time, you'll just feel that sitting on the cold bench is really comfortable."

These words are honest and down-to-earth, yet they also reveal a kind of bitterness that only an expert would understand.

The two nurses nodded in agreement, and the distance between them and Ye Zhen completely disappeared, replaced by a sense of closeness as if she were one of their own.

Hu Dazhi sat to the side, watching the girl who was holding an enamel mug to warm her hands.

She sat beside a tall stack of medical records, her back ramrod straight. Although she had been relegated to this less-than-ideal position, her calm and composed demeanor gave the dilapidated archives room the aura of a specialist clinic.

This girl is definitely pregnant.

Hu Dazhi's itch to cherish talent resurfaced. He was a medical fanatic; although his skills were mediocre, he loved to ponder things.

"Um... Xiao Ye," Hu Dazhi hesitated for a moment, but couldn't help speaking up, "Since we're talking about surgery, there's something I've been wanting to say for a long time. A while ago, a fellow villager from our county, over sixty years old, fell while working in the fields and broke his thighbone."

"Femoral neck fracture?" Ye Zhen accurately stated the diagnosis without even lifting her eyelids.

"Yes, yes, yes! That's it!" Hu Dazhi slapped his thigh. "We invited experts from the city to perform traction and fixation with screws. I think the surgery was quite successful, and the reduction and healing were good. But it's been almost half a year, and the patient is still complaining of pain. He can't even turn over, let alone get out of bed. Last week's X-ray showed that the fracture line was blurred, but why does the bone look more and more... more and more wrong?"

This is a major worry for Hu Dazhi. He thought it would be a chance to show off, but now the patient's family comes to make trouble every day, saying that the treatment has made things worse.

Ye Zhen gently rubbed her fingers against the slightly hot cup.

"Where was the nail driven in?" she asked.

"Just... the usual spot, right in the middle," Hu Dazhi gestured.

"How many did you use?"

"Three hollow nails, that's the best we have around here."

Ye Zhen put down her cup, and her eyes, which had just been smiling, instantly turned sharp, like a newly unsealed scalpel.

"Does the patient experience deep tenderness in the area slightly below the midpoint of the groin whenever they put weight on it?"

Hu Dazhi was stunned, his eyes widening in disbelief: "Amazing! How did you know? Old Zhao... no, Dean Zhao said during rounds that the old man was faking the pain, but when I pressed that spot, he screamed like a pig being slaughtered!"

"It wasn't an act."

Ye Zhen stood up, walked to the newly organized orthopedic medical record shelf, casually pulled out a blank medical record sheet, and took out a pen from her pocket.

"Shuashuashua——"

The pen tip traced a few simple and smooth lines on the paper.

A few seconds later, a standard anatomical sketch of the femoral head appeared on the paper, with lines so precise they looked printed on.

"You only focused on the healing of the fracture, ignoring the blood supply." Ye Zhen pointed heavily at the femoral head with the tip of her pen. Her voice was not loud, but every word carried great weight. "In the elderly, even if the femoral neck fracture is reduced, the damage to the medial circumflex femoral artery is often irreversible."

She looked up at Hu Dazhi, her eyes revealing a chilling sense of professional pressure.

"This wasn't a surgical failure, it was a problem with post-operative management. Did you keep him on absolute bed rest, completely immobilized for three months?"

Hu Dazhi nodded blankly: "It takes a hundred days to recover from a broken bone... isn't that a rule passed down from our ancestors?"

"That was the old rule." Ye Zhen coldly shattered his understanding. "For this type of fracture, prolonged immobilization will obstruct venous return, exacerbate intraosseous hypertension, and directly cut off the last remaining path to survival for the femoral head."

"What...what does that mean?" Hu Dazhi felt a chill on his back, and cold sweat trickled down his spine.

"It means," Ye Zhen pushed the diagram in front of Hu Dazhi, "that patient's femoral head should already have avascular necrosis. If there is no intervention, the femoral head will collapse in three months, and the leg will be useless."

boom--

It felt like a thunderclap had exploded in Hu Dazhi's mind.

Avascular necrosis of the femoral head.

In a county-level hospital in that era, those five words meant a terminal illness, a death sentence, and meant that the patient would have to rely on crutches or even be paralyzed for the rest of their life.

"Then...what do we do?" Hu Dazhi panicked, forgetting all about his status as vice president, and stood up anxiously, looking at Ye Zhen. "We can't just watch the old man become disabled, can we? His family will smash up the hospital! That old man's family has been poor farmers for three generations; if they make a scene, we won't be in the right!"

Just moments ago, he was a lowly employee who had been "exiled," but now he has become Hu Dazhi's only lifeline.

Ye Zhen looked at the flustered Hu Dazhi, her expression unchanged.

She picked up the enamel mug again, gently blew on it, and the rising steam blurred her delicate features, but couldn't hide the confident air of control in her eyes.

"As long as it hasn't collapsed yet, there's still hope."

She took a sip of water to moisten her slightly dry throat, her voice as flat as if she were talking about eating steamed buns in the cafeteria that evening.

Have you heard of "drill-through decompression surgery"?

Hu Dazhi shook his head blankly, as if listening to gibberish.

"It's okay if you don't know." Ye Zhen put down her cup, glanced at the deep night outside the window, and said, "Take me to see the patient tomorrow."

The archives were deathly silent.

Xiao Liu and Xiao Zhang covered their mouths, staring in disbelief at the scene before them.

The usually domineering Vice President Hu was now like a schoolboy who had made a mistake, nodding repeatedly to the girl who was even younger than them. His eyes showed not resentment, but rather a kind of fanaticism as if he had seen a living Buddha.

Hu Dazhi held the piece of paper with the sketch in his hand, his palms sweating.

A true expert's skill is immediately apparent.

This isn't some pampered young lady who got in through connections! This is clearly a true Buddha sent by God to Qingyun County Hospital!

He suddenly felt that letting this great Buddha stay in this dusty archive room was a crime, a waste of a precious resource!